WAYNE DODD grew up among farmers and ranchers in Oklahoma. He has lived in, additionally, numerous other places in America, including Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Ohio. As both poet and teacher of poetry (he is Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University), he has worked, read his poems, and lectured at many colleges, universities, and art centers.

He is the author of eleven books, most recently The Blue Salvages and Of Desire and Disorder (both from Carnegie Mellon University Press) and Toward the End of the Century: Essays into Poetry (University of Iowa Press). His work has been honored by nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and has been a finalist for the American Academy of Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Among the literary awards and recognitions he has received are grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Park Service. He is the recipient of the Krout Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Ohioana Library Association, and the 2001 Governor's Award for the Arts/Individual Artist Award.

Wayne Dodd has been editor of THE OHIO REVIEW for 30 years, since its creation in 1971. In that capacity he has received several awards, including an award for Editorial Distinction from The Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (New York) and The Ohioana Award for Editorial Excellence from the Martha Kinney Cooper Ohioana Library Association.

 

"I tend to believe that language is matter's aspiration, its longing to become spirit, and that matter is spirit's longing to become body. A paradox. Which is, after all, poetry's ground (even as it is also, according to Niels Bohr, a necessary condition for all progress in science). Of course a poem too is a body, a physical as well as spiritual being. And it enacts-reenacts perhaps-the attempt to recover the body, to rescue it from vanishing, even as in the very utterance the transition from body to spirit and spirit to body is acted out before us-and within us."